My InfoBarrel Income Report – October 2011

It’s been a while since I wrote an Income report for my InfoBarrel earnings. I won’t go back and detail out the last few months but I will say that despite taking largely a complete break from InfoBarrel for roughly 3 months or so my earnings climbed month over month over month as articles aged, as I built some media pages on the site, and as I built a few links to some of my previously published articles.

My last income report published in July for earnings in the month of June saw a monthly IB income of $518.78 with revenue split between Adsense, Chitika, and Amazon. At the end of June I was removed from the Amazon Affiliate program due to my residency in the state of California however in early October CA affiliates were let back into the program due to CA state politicking.

I won’t go into the details but for now it looks like I’m in the program until at least next Fall and then it’s up to legislation whether I will stay in. We all hear about business uncertainty – this is a perfect example of how government creates uncertainty. Should I invest my time and money into selling Amazon goods? I don’t know… I will marginally push forward on that front I suppose.

July, August, & Sep In Short

In July I went and changed a few of my prominent Amazon links on IB so that I wasn’t leaking as much traffic to not monetized destinations and I got lucky that traffic started picking up that month allowing me to fully recoup that income.

The loss in Amazon affiliate earnings was definitely felt in all three months although Adsense did start picking up for various reasons including a better CTR on IB articles (thank you IB admin for getting the placement of ads right) as well, more media pages published on the site, and a recovery of traffic from the Spring algo updates.

In July I made $557.06 across all sources.
In August I made $557.25 across all sources.
In September I made $494.17 across all sources.

During this time I built some strategic media pages on my IB articles but I mostly focused my efforts, (writing & publishing) on other sites I own and maintain. These other sites of course make their own stream of income which I don’t typically report.

An October Surprise

Around the third of October I was happy to receive the email welcoming me back to Amazon Associates and I was really pleased that they reactivated all my existing affiliate links. This meant that I was essentially going to be making a good chunk of change on Amazon overnight with no extra effort at all. The income is completely based on work I did many months ago – it’s nice to get that back.

I also started building out more media pages on older existing articles here on IB which all convert into revenue much better than normal pages. I outlined how I do this in this post on using pictures on IB. In the end my traffic to media pages increase October over September by roughly 35% and my income on media pages alone topped $125 for the month.

During The Month of October 2011 I made:
Adsense - $534.94
Chitika - $66.70
Amazon - $75.51

For a grand total of $677.15 for the month – a 37% increase over Sept and 9.3% increase over my previous best month on IB, Feb. 2011.

This was not my best month ever online but it was my best month ever for InfoBarrel… and I was only at the 75% revenue sharing tier for the month.

November – A Look Ahead

I posted a bit on the IB forums the last week of October that I was planning on investing heavily into my IB portfolio over the next couple months and that I had set a $1000 goal for the month of November on the site. In future blog posts I cover some of the ways I intend on doing this but in the mean time I’ll shorten it to say I will be marketing my best earning posts, building media pages and linking to them internally, and publishing a ton of new content on the site.

To start off I finished up October by publishing a set of articles on Microsuede Throw Pillows which should do well with some time and love and this put me into the 80% revenue share tier for the month of November. That alone should boost my earnings by a bit month over month but I still will be needing to do a ton of work.

Look for more stimulating article on throw pillows which have yet to be published… and make sure to check out this awesome pet hair remover article for a look into how I like building affiliate sales on the InfoBarrel domain.

Good luck to you all, May November treat you all well.